2 yr old sayings bad words and calling names

09-13-2011, 04:27 PM

Hi! The past few weeks my 2yr old (3 in january) has been doing a lot of name calling to her siblings and using bad words, and i would love some suggestions to to handle this in a positive way. I have been trying to teach her alternative words to use, or to express the emotion at hand instead of calling a name, but I feel like its not making much of a difference. Her father and I unfortunately have very different patience levels and approaches, and he threatens to use soap or hot sauce, which kills me as I do not agree w/ punishment. And yes, we have ourselves cussed in front of the kids, which I know is not good role modeling. I have mostly stopped w/ the exception of an occasional slip up, but her dad cusses all the time, as well as calling names to his family members. How do you handle one parent trying to teach good language while the other constantly does what the other preaches against? I am at a loss, really frustrated and feeling helpless.

We asked our Facebook friends their thoughts and here are a few of the comments:

--Mine have repeated things that they have heard elsewhere. We tend to no react, but 'correct' them at this age. For.instance. My.lovely friend came to stay, she tries her best, but when she gets excited in conversation, she says 'f#@king hell, man'. My 2 year old adores her, and after she went, we heard him repeat it (he was listening to music at the time) so we 'corrected' him to.say 'rocking out man'.

--my 3 yo overheard his teenaged sister on the phone talking to her friend and ended up repeating the undesirable words (shut up, stupid) over and over and over. Like Elanor we just suggested a more acceptable substitute word when he said it and over time he stopped altogether. Big sister learned to mind her language around him, too.

--when my son was that age we just told him those words were not nice and tried to watch our language. we knew that if we didn't want him to say them, we couldn't either... and if he caught us saying something we would tell him he was right, that we shouldn't say them... most of the time, though, he picked those words up from other places (overheard while shopping or at the park for example)...